The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  “The bags were not even taken into consideration,” recalled Degl’Innocenti. “The whole concept of a soft bag didn’t come to Gucci until several years later, and even then, with a lot of internal conflict—we had to retrain people who were used to making the hard leather bags.”

  Mello knew that she had to balance the revival of Gucci’s traditions with the latest fashion trends, so she responded to women’s need for a soft handbag that could be easily packed in a suitcase by reviving the hobo bag she remembered so fondly from her youth—a supple, roomy pouch that had not been sold since 1975. But, like a girl all dressed up with no place to go, Gucci’s new look remained invisible to most of the fashion set, which was far more captivated by the exciting shows and whirlwind parties put on by designers such as Giorgio Armani, Valentino, and Gianni Versace.

  “We couldn’t get anyone to come and see us,” recalled Mello. “It was a real problem.” After the international press ignored her first presentation for Gucci at Florence’s Villa Cora hotel in the spring of 1990, Mello had an idea. She asked her secretary to call up all the influential fashion editors in New York and ask for their shoe sizes; she mailed Gucci’s new loafers to everyone she could think of. “That was how we got them,” said Mello, with a satisfied smile.

  By January of 1990, Maurizio had sent around a letter to some 665 U.S. retail clients announcing he was closing down the canvas Gucci Accessories Collection and discontinuing the Gucci wholesale business to department stores—effective immediately. A wail of protest went up from top executives of leading department stores, but Maurizio refused to compromise. Domenico De Sole tried to dissuade him, knowing full well the canvas products represented the backbone of Gucci’s business in the United States—with total revenues of nearly $100 million. De Sole appealed to Investcorp, telling them what Maurizio had done and warning them of the consequences. He thought it would be better to pare the business back more slowly.

  Maurizio not only held fast, he also slashed the duty-free business worldwide. Between the GAC, the wholesale business, and the duty-free, the cuts represented some $110 million in total revenue.

  “We can’t clean our dirty linens in public,” he insisted to the team at Investcorp. “We have to fix up our own house and then go back to the market from a position of strength. Then we will be able to command the terms,” he said.

  Maurizio knew he had to bury Gucci’s “drugstore” image before he could bring the glamour back. From now on, Gucci’s business would be limited exclusively to its then sixty-four wholly controlled stores—which Maurizio set about refurbishing with the help of his interior designer buddy, Toto Russo.

  Maurizio wanted Gucci’s customers to walk into his stores and feel as though they were in a plush, tastefully decorated living room. He left no detail to chance. With Toto, he developed new cabinets and fixtures in polished tanganica and walnut to display Gucci’s new accessories and clothing. Cabinets were enclosed with fine, emerald-cut beveled glass. Round polished mahogany tables displayed rainbows of silk scarves and ties. Custom-made alabaster lamps hung from the ceiling with gold linked chains, creating warm, residential-like lighting. Original oil paintings graced the walls. Toto developed two chairs for the selling floor that he copied from original Russian antiques and reproduced in large quantities for the stores: the Czar chair, which went in the menswear selling area was modeled after a neoclassical piece, while the daintier walnut Nicoletta, dating from the 1800s, was for the women’s area. The bills for these lavish furnishings mounted, but Maurizio waved them aside. He wanted the stores to be perfect.

  “In order to sell style, we must have style!” he insisted.

  When Mello saw that Russo’s project—beautiful as it was—lacked the merchandising techniques she felt were important to sell the goods, she brought in American architect Naomi Leff to try to streamline some of the fixtures—creating an immediate clash between the Neapolitan interior designer and the American architect.

  Maurizio had little time or inclination to mediate—he pressed forward with his plans. Thanks to the long days of cataloging Gucci’s product offerings back in the eighties, Maurizio and his staff pared down the product line to some 7,000 items from 22,000, sliced the number of handbag styles from 350 to 100, and reduced the number of stores from more than 1,000 to 180.

  In June 1990, Maurizio’s new team presented its first fall collection. Gucci, as was its custom, rented space at the old Centro Meeting conference center in Florence for the entire month and invited Gucci’s eight-hundred-some buyers from around the world to buy the collection.

  Mello and Lambertson had set out the new bamboo bags, the hobo bags, and the loafers, all arranged in a rainbow of colors. When Maurizio arrived to preview the collection he walked slowly through it, looking at each item, speechless. Then he wept. His were tears of joy.

  When all the staff and buyers had finally gathered in the showroom, he held up one of the new bamboo handbags for all to see. “This is what my father worked for,” Maurizio said. “This is what Gucci used to be!”

  Convinced that in order to achieve its new status Gucci needed to have a strong presence in Milan, Maurizio had started to look for an appropriate site for a new Gucci headquarters in Italy’s fashion and financial capital. By the late 1980s, Milan already vied with Paris as an acclaimed fashion center. Paris was still the city of couture, while Milan had emerged as the center for modern, elegant ready-to-wear. Armani and Versace had become the kingpins of fashion in Milan, but there were also exciting new designers, such as Dolce & Gabbana. With journalists and buyers flocking to Milan twice a year for the seasonal designer fashion shows, Maurizio felt Gucci needed to be part of the action. Maurizio also felt far more at home in Milan than Florence, where some thought he even felt uncomfortable.

  Again, with Toto’s help, Maurizio rented a beautiful five-story building on Piazza San Fedele, a small square paved with smooth white stones located between the Duomo and La Scala, the opera house, that backed up onto the stately columns of Palazzo Marino, Milan’s imposing city hall. The renovations proceeded at lightning speed and everything was ready in record time, less than five months from start to finish, including remodeling and furnishings—unheard of even for Milan.

  The executive offices on the top floor all opened onto a spacious terrace circling the building, where table and chairs were set under a lattice arbor so on sunny days Gucci’s top management could lunch outside. Maurizio’s executive suite was one of Toto’s crowning achievements. Walnut wainscoting, parquet floors, and forest green fabric on the walls gave a warm, elegant feel to Maurizio’s office, which opened through double doors into a small conference room furnished with a square table and four chairs. Maurizio spent most of his time in this conference room, rather than at his Charles X desk, and preferred to receive visitors there, where they could spread out their materials and talk. He had brought the famous busts representing the four continents up from the old “Sala Dynasty” in Florence and set one in each corner of the conference room. Here he also hung a black-and-white photograph of his father, Rodolfo, and his grandfather Guccio. He had upgraded the old flip charts from Via Monte Napoleone into a modern, automated system with pages that advanced electronically set into discreet cupboards along one wall, where he also placed a television and stereo set. A pair of sliding doors opened from Maurizio’s personal conference room into a large, formal boardroom. Entirely finished in walnut paneling, the room contained a long, oval conference table and twelve leather-covered chairs.

  On the wall of his office, diagonally to the right of his desk and over the green leather studded couch from Via Monte Napoleone, Maurizio hung a painting of Venice that had belonged to his father. On the side table next to the couch went the black-and-white photograph of Rodolfo. The photo of his mother stood on his own desk, where he also kept a gimmicky gift from Allegra—a funny, battery-operated Coca-Cola can dressed like a person wearing eyeglasses that shook with laughter when somebody came into the room. Oppo
site the couch stood an antique console, on which he placed the smiling photographs of Alessandra and Allegra and a miniature trunk filled with crystal liquor bottles. Liliana’s desk stood in the green carpeted entranceway in front of Maurizio’s office, while Dawn Mello had asked for a small office on the other side of the floor with a view of the spires of Milan’s cathedral—if she had to trade in her view of Central Park, at least she wanted to see the Duomo. She especially loved the double French doors that opened onto the terrace.

  Administrative offices filled the fourth floor of the San Fedele building, and the design studio and offices took up the third floor. The press office was on the second floor, while Dawn had ordered a small showroom on the first floor for Gucci’s seasonal presentations.

  By September 1991, the new offices in Piazza San Fedele were ready and Maurizio organized a staff cocktail and dinner party on the rooftop terrace to inaugurate the new building. He welcomed them all with an enthusiastic speech and established a task force for each product area and business activity to study Gucci’s relaunch.

  Maurizio also believed that the company needed a more sophisticated approach to human resource issues and training to eliminate the factional fiefdomlike management of the past and imbue all its employees with a common vision of Gucci. He developed the concept of a “Gucci school” to train employees in the Gucci history, the Gucci strategy, and a Gucci outlook in addition to offering professional and technical expertise.

  To this end, Maurizio bought a sixteenth-century villa called Villa Bellosguardo that had belonged to the opera star Enrico Caruso, slated $10 million to refurbish it, and dreamed of establishing the Gucci school there. In Maurizio’s mind, the villa would also serve as a cultural, conference, and exhibition center. Located in the Florentine hills at Lastra a Signa, Villa Bellosguardo overlooked the rolling hills and fields of the surrounding Tuscan countryside. A long drive bordered with sculptures of divine figures led to the front entrance of the villa, which was flanked by a gracious double staircase. Out back, steps led from a long, rectangular patio bordered by stone columns down to a Renaissance garden. On initial visits to Bellosguardo, however, Maurizio learned from the watchman that the villa was haunted, and decided to bring Frida—the psychic who had exorcised the Creole—down to banish any negative influences that might have lingered.

  Maurizio couldn’t exorcise the ghosts of his family’s past battles as easily as those in the Villa Bellosguardo, however, and Gucci communications director Pilar Crespi recalled that they spent hours talking about how to deal with the past. While Maurizio encouraged a return to the principles of quality and style that had piloted Gucci to success, he shunned the family disputes that had dragged the name through the mud. Crespi found herself at a loss when journalists would call for information about the battle with Paolo, or background about the family wars.

  “I kept getting these phone calls and going to him and saying, ‘Maurizio, how are we going to deal with the past?’” Crespi said. “He was very angry with Paolo, in particular,” she recalled. “He really didn’t want to talk about him or the others. He would say, ‘Gucci is a new Gucci, don’t discuss the past! Paolo is the past—I am the new Gucci!’”

  Maurizio had taken up the Gucci mantle, but he didn’t know how to wash it of its stains. “I sat with him for hours. He never understood that the past would come back to haunt him,” Crespi said.

  In the fall of 1990, with the help of the McCann Erickson advertising agency, Mello showed how much she had learned from Maurizio’s initial teachings and her visits to the local manufacturers. She created a $9 million advertising campaign featured in top fashion and lifestyle magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, built around the concept “The Hand of Gucci.” The portfolio featured the suede loafers, rich-looking leather bags, and sporty new suede backpacks in an effort to show both Gucci’s traditions and its comeback.

  Though the first campaign was successful, Mello quickly realized that it was going to be difficult to sustain Gucci’s new image without giving more importance to apparel. Even though Gucci had always done the bulk of its business in handbags and accessories, Mello knew that clothing was key to establish a concept on which to build Gucci’s new identity.

  “It was hard to create an image with a handbag and a pair of shoes,” Mello said. “I convinced Maurizio that Gucci needed to have ready-to-wear for the image. We were always trying to pull Maurizio forward on the fashion side,” she said.

  Although Maurizio had pushed the fashion accelerator and hired Luciano Soprani back in the early eighties, during his Swiss exile he had revised his thinking to focus on Gucci’s artisanal leather-working roots. By the early nineties, he did not believe pursuing a fashion strategy was right for Gucci.

  “Maurizio’s philosophy at the time was that he didn’t believe in designers,” said Lambertson, who was trying to build a full-fledged design team for Gucci. “He didn’t believe in fashion shows and he didn’t believe in promoting any one name to the detriment of Gucci’s. He thought the accessories should speak for the company.”

  Up until then, all of Gucci’s apparel had been done in-house, a costly, labor-intensive undertaking. Gucci didn’t have the capacity to produce, merchandise, and distribute apparel competitively and it quickly became apparent that the company’s best bet was to give a production contract to an apparel manufacturer. After a few seasons, Gucci struck agreements with two top-notch Italian clothing producers: Ermenegildo Zegna for the menswear and Zamasport for women’s wear.

  Lambertson also spent a lot of time looking for the right people to join their team—and then trying to convince them to move to Italy and work for Gucci. “We mostly spent the first six months just hiring people,” he recalled. “It was hard to get anyone to work for Gucci at that point. And Maurizio didn’t want to hire too many Americans—he was worried about keeping Gucci Italian.”

  When Mello and Lamberston arrived at Gucci, there was already a small group of young designers working there. “These kids were all from London and living in Scandicci,” Lambertson recalled, “but nobody really paid any attention to them. They were isolated in their own world. The company didn’t really believe in designers,” he recalled. “Dawn and I kept stressing to Maurizio that we really needed a ready-to-wear designer.”

  As Mello and Lambertson built their team, a young, unknown New York designer named Tom Ford and his journalist boyfriend, Richard Buckley, were mulling over a move to Europe.

  Ford was from a middle-class family in Austin, Texas, where he grew up until his family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico—the home of his father’s mother, Ruth—when he was a teenager. Both of his parents were real estate brokers. His mother was an attractive Tippi Hedren look-alike, who wore tailored clothes, simple heels, and her blond hair in a chignon. His father was a supportive, liberal-thinking man, who as Ford grew older also became a true friend.

  “Growing up in Texas was really oppressive for me,” Ford said. “If you’re not white and Protestant and do certain things, it can be pretty rough, especially if you’re a boy and don’t want to play football and chew tobacco and get drunk all the time.” Ford found Santa Fe much more sophisticated and stimulating and especially loved spending the summers at his grandmother Ruth’s house, where he also lived for a year and a half. To Ford, Grandmother Ruth was an Auntie Mame character who dressed flamboyantly in big hats, big hair, big fake eyelashes, and big jewelry: bracelets, squash blossom buckles, concha belts, and papier-mâché earrings. As a boy, Ford loved to watch her get dressed for the cocktail parties she was always running off to.

  “She was the kind of person who used to say, ‘Ooooh, you like that honey? Well, go ahead and get ten of them,’” Ford said with a sweeping wave of his hand. “She was all about excess and openness and her life was much more glamorous than my parents’ life—she just wanted to have fun! I’ll always remember her smell. She wore Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew—she was always trying to seem younger.”

  Ford believes
those early memories had a fundamental impact on his design sensibility. “Most people are influenced throughout their lives by those very first images of beauty. Those images stick with you and they are the images of your taste. The aesthetics of the era you grew up in come with you.”

  Ford’s parents encouraged him to explore his creative talent from an early age through drawing and painting and other such activities—without placing limits on his imagination.

  “It didn’t matter to them what I wanted to do, so long as I was happy,” Ford said. From a young age, Ford had very specific ideas about what he liked and didn’t like.

  “From the time I was three I wouldn’t wear THAT jacket and I didn’t want THOSE shoes and THAT chair wasn’t good enough,” Ford recalled. As he grew older, when his parents went out to dinner or a movie he would recruit his younger sister into helping him rearrange the furniture, heaving and pulling sofas and chairs into new positions.

  “It was never right, it was never good enough, it was always wrong,” Ford said. “I really gave my family a complex. Even to this day they all say they get nervous when they see me. Even though I’ve learned not to say anything, they can feel me looking them up and down, clocking everything.”

  From the age of thirteen and after, Ford’s personal uniform consisted of Gucci loafers, blue blazers, and button-down oxford shirts. He attended an exclusive Santa Fe prep school and dated girls—some of whom he fell in love with. But he had his eyes on New York City, where he went after graduating and enrolled at New York University. One night, a classmate invited him to a party; it didn’t take Ford long to realize it was an all-guy party. In the middle of it, Andy Warhol showed up, and in no time the group traipsed off to Studio 54. A sweet, fresh-faced boy from the West with a movie star smile and an air of snob appeal, Ford was welcomed into the crowd. Before the night was over, Warhol was chatting earnestly with Ford and drugs appeared out of nowhere. Ford, whose lifestyle up to then had resembled that of the clean-cut boy in a toothpaste ad, blinked at the fast, hip life quickly unfolding around him. “It was a bit of a shock,” Ford admitted later.